7 Tips to Improve Data Backup and Ensure Business Continuity

With today's modern solutions, enterprises should be able to transform backup and recovery from a low-level legacy IT function to a modern function delivering continuity and value to the entire business.

Automate Everything

Tip 2: Automate everything you can.

Many legacy backup and DR solutions rely on manual, time-consuming processes. This is especially true for those organizations that still rely on tape for backups. In fact, DR testing is so disruptive for many companies that they only do it once a year – if at all.

Today, you can automate not only core-scheduled backup processes, but also processes associated with moving backup data offsite to the cloud. This means you can rapidly move most backup tasks away from manual processes involving tapes, rotational media and physical shipping.

In addition, for DR and compliance reporting, you can systematically automate backup and disaster recovery testing. Instead of testing once a year, automated recovery assurance technology can run daily to validate that backup and DR will work as guaranteed. With this type of solution in place, you won't have to fear the 2 A.M. phone call that your systems are down. You can rest assured that you can recover in minutes, because your backup was automatically verified within the last few hours.

7 Tips to Improve Data Backup and Ensure Business Continuity

Automate Everything

Tip 2: Automate everything you can.

Many legacy backup and DR solutions rely on manual, time-consuming processes. This is especially true for those organizations that still rely on tape for backups. In fact, DR testing is so disruptive for many companies that they only do it once a year – if at all.

Today, you can automate not only core-scheduled backup processes, but also processes associated with moving backup data offsite to the cloud. This means you can rapidly move most backup tasks away from manual processes involving tapes, rotational media and physical shipping.

In addition, for DR and compliance reporting, you can systematically automate backup and disaster recovery testing. Instead of testing once a year, automated recovery assurance technology can run daily to validate that backup and DR will work as guaranteed. With this type of solution in place, you won't have to fear the 2 A.M. phone call that your systems are down. You can rest assured that you can recover in minutes, because your backup was automatically verified within the last few hours.

Improving backup and continuity is frequently listed as a top five priority for IT organizations, but for many organizations, backup and recovery processes need to improve a lot, not just incrementally.

Today, enterprises often run backup tools, and rely on business continuity processes, designed for older platforms developed before elastic clouds, near-ubiquitous virtualized workloads, or SaaS applications began to dominate the IT landscape. Numerous businesses also still use solutions that rely on tape for retaining data. These systems are inefficient, costly, and difficult to manage. They can't scale to serve exponential data growth. They don't respond well to new threats like ransomware. They make it more difficult to execute on digital transformation or other strategic initiatives. Worst of all, you cannot confidently rely on them to work 100 percent of time for minor incidents, never mind during a disaster.

Fortunately, you no longer have to live with these problems. Backup technologies and data recovery (DR) solutions have improved dramatically in recent years. With today's modern solutions, enterprises should be able to transform backup and recovery from a low-level legacy IT function to a modern function delivering continuity and value to the entire business. In this slideshow, Unitrends has identified seven practical steps that can be taken today that will dramatically change how continuity is delivered, while helping to establish disaster recovery systems that support any technology or business strategy.

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